


Abiding

by Eithe



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: F/M, and one ridiculous pure-fluff conjecture ficlet, three rewritten scenes, written for Wayhaven Week 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:53:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25383376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eithe/pseuds/Eithe
Summary: Four fics written for Wayhaven Week 2020 overlapping with the latter half of Book 2, ft. my 0 combat creampuff Detective Genevieve Layton.
Relationships: Female Detective/Adam du Mortain
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	1. Strive, Seek

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day 4 of Wayhaven Week 2020. Prompts: Tranquil/Thrill.  
> A rewrite of the research day.

For all the morning dawns too early for her liking, Genevieve has been looking forward to research. Her first glimpse of the library left her eager to dig into the tomes it contained, and now she’s being invited to do so. Three volumes in she’s… a little less enthusiastic, maybe, but that’s just because of the lack of progress. The vanillin smell of old paper, combined with aging cloth and dusty leather, is comforting, and golden sunlight filters in to illuminate the space, and really - there’s worse ways to spend her weekend. Except--

“Ugh,” Farah groans, “I’m so _bored_.”

“How about actually helping, then?” Morgan snaps, slamming shut the book she’s been grimly slogging through and chucking it at the younger agent.

Genevieve winces when the book thuds to the floor face-down, crumpling pages beneath its own weight. She slips out of her seat to collect it and carefully flatten out the creases before placing it gently in her own pile of to-be-read books, well out of grabbing range for either of her companions so it won’t be further abused as improvised weaponry.

Farah, apparently opting to take having things thrown at her as encouragement, shifts her attention away from the books and focuses on Morgan, instead.

“Oh come on, don’t tell me you’re enjoying this.”

“It’s got to be done,” Morgan says with no sympathy at all. “Better to get on with it. And I _was_ enjoying the quiet.”

Morgan reaches for another book to replace the one she flung at Farah with a definite air of someone ignoring a younger sibling, and Genevieve bites back a smile. Farah turns to her in time to catch the expression, pouting.

“You’re not bored at all, are you.”

Genevieve chuckles and stops trying to hide her smile.

“Actually, I’m enjoying myself… but it’s pretty clear you aren’t. What do you say you two search the internet and I focus on the books?”

True, the expectation was clearly that all three of them would all stay and research in the library, but it’s definitely more efficient to have one dedicated researcher than three who get nothing done because they’re all distracted. There’s some negotiation involved - apparently Nate’s antipathy for technology means there aren’t any computers in the public spaces of the warehouse - but Morgan eventually volunteers the use of her own computer.

(It’s a kindness that Genevieve appreciates, but she’s also very glad she won’t be availing herself of it; she’d just as soon not know what auto-fill has to say about Morgan’s browsing habits.)

“You sure you don’t want to come with us?” Farah asks, like she really can’t believe anyone would rather stay in the library than do… well, anything else.

Genevieve grins at her.

“I’m sure - and I’m also sure that someone needs to be here when Nate and Adam get back and decide to check on our progress.”

That’s all the encouragement Farah needs to sprint for the door - where she almost runs headlong into Adam. He folds his arms and stares down at the younger agent.

“Where are you going?”

The tone says he has several ideas as to the answer and disapproves thoroughly of all of them.

Farah stammers the start of what is clearly going to be a not-very-convincing excuse, so Genevieve steps in;

“We arrived upon a mutually agreeable division of labor. I’ll stay here and focus on the books while the two of them search the internet.”

She tries to get her face to communicate that he would be doing her a very great favor if he’d let them go. Miraculously, he seems to not only hear the message but agree. He shifts his attention back to Farah and Morgan and says,

“Fine. But you better have some actual research to contribute at the end of the day.”

Farah agrees with a rapidity that says it’s probably at least half a lie and then takes off, followed closely by Morgan. They’re definitely going to watch at least two cat videos, she’s pretty sure, because Farah is faster and she’s going to get to the computer first. Genevieve smiles after them before shifting her gaze up to meet Adam’s.

“Thank you,” she says, and then starts to go back to her book.

“I can stay with you, if you wish,” Adam suddenly offers. “To help with research.”

She blinks at him for a moment in pure befuddlement, but... her mother did say some of these books are his.

And it’s not as if she’d ever turn down a chance to spend some time with him. She’s just surprised that he offered; he seems dedicated to avoiding her most of the time, and the exceptions can be chalked up to work and missions and duty. This doesn’t seem to fall under any of those headings.

Maybe work? Learning about these strange supernaturals will give them an edge - in negotiations, hopefully, but perhaps also in the event of conflict, should it come to that.

It’s not that he wants to spend time with her; she has to remember that. Thinking otherwise will just lead to breaking her own heart.

“Please,” she says, once she remembers an answer is called for. It leaves space for an awkward pause, so starts to go back to her book just for something to focus on - but it’s very hard to keep her attention on printed words, suddenly, because Adam shrugs out of his coat. His T-shirt clings, and his muscles ripple even when he’s doing something so prosaic as taking off a layer, and her mouth goes dry. 

Everything about him is just... profoundly unfair.

She snaps her gaze back down to her book when he turns to take a seat, aware her cheeks are warm and grateful that he probably won’t notice. The words are still kind of nonsensical, so she shifts, pulling her feet out of her sandals and tucking them up underneath herself, leaning into the arm of the sofa.

Moving gives her a good excuse for needing to re-read the page. She’s reasonably sure he won’t have noticed - but when she glances up again, after he’s had a moment to get settled, too, she’s surprised to meet his green eyes rather than seeing him already immersed in a book of his own.

He coughs, handling the volume with a surprising degree of care.

“What are we looking for?”

She sighs a little. That’s enough to get her attention back on the issue at hand, anyway, because it’s frustrating.

“Unfortunately, nothing specific, and I imagine the drag-net approach is why we lost Farah’s attention so early in the process. Nate said to keep an eye out for legends or creatures that might fit the description of what we’ve seen.”

“Nothing to narrow it down further?”

“We’re starting with Estonian myth, although Nate warned me that just because they speak Estonian doesn’t mean the race they belong to will be Estonian or even Baltic.”

Adam nods.

“True. Many supernatural races have spread out over the millennia, which can make knowing their country of origin largely useless.” There’s something amused in his eyes when he glances at her over the top of his book. “Not all vampires are Transylvanian, after all.”

She can’t help laughing at that, even as she shakes her head.

“You all told me the stories were complete nonsense and fabrication. And that one in particular doesn’t exactly paint you in the best of lights.”

He watches her with a half-smile.

“Still preferable to the current trend towards fascination and romanticization.”

She hesitates for a moment, but he seems to be in such a good mood, so she risks it, continuing the banter;

“Was the joke about sparkling in poor taste?”

He huffs out a breath, but the smile doesn’t leave.

“Yes, but only because it suggests you might have actually consumed the material that gave rise to the idea.”

She grins.

“I did. They were surprisingly readable. Kind of like potato chips; after I’d tried one, it was as easy to keep going as not and then, whups, I’d finished the whole series. In my defense, it only took a weekend, and Tina wanted someone else to have opinions about them so we could horrify Verda with our life choices.”

Adam looks mildly traumatized by the idea she voluntarily consumed books featuring sparkly vampires, and she has to laugh again. He still doesn’t look as appalled as Verda did.

“Don’t worry,” she tells him, aware her voice has gone just a little too soft and fond around her smile, “I did not actually imagine vampires would sparkle, and I’m more interested in getting to know all of you as people than comparing you to stories and myths.”

“Good. It can be dangerous - to both humans and supernaturals - when fiction colors expectation.”

His voice is heavy, and she puts her book down in her lap to give that the attention it deserves.

He’d said the supernatural she ran into in town was afraid of her because she could present a danger, and that the girl’s fear was entirely justified. That it was the way things were. That they would remain that way unless she could change the human race.

And Farah had said something about humans often rejecting vampires, specifically.

She starts to speak, to ask if that’s really how he feels, but Adam clears his throat and changes the subject, the way he always does when he realizes he’s given her some kind of emotional opening.

“We should get to work, or we’ll have nothing to show for our efforts.”

She holds back her sigh and returns to her book. If she sneaks occasional glances at Adam from across the room, well, she tries not to do it too often or to let on how distracting she finds his presence.

Because she’s trying so hard to keep her attention where it ought to be, she almost flinches when he breaks the silence again;

“Why did you decide to do research?”

It’s an easy question, at least.

“I really don't like to fight,” she says, “and I’m not good at it. A skilled human could wipe the floor with me; given all the additional advantages a supernatural opponent will have, the best route to victory is to prevent a conflict from escalating in the first place.”

“‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,’” he quotes, and the sheer surprise of it makes her laugh again.

“Yes,” she agrees, going back to her book with a smile.

The quiet is companionable, and they pass several hours that way, only occasionally bringing up something that might prove to be relevant before lapsing back into silence.

It’s so nice she hates to interrupt, but she knows better than to stay sitting for too long. So she stands and stretches, and winces at the crunching noise her spine makes. Clearly that was, in fact, ‘too long,’ but with the incentive of Adam seeming comfortable in her presence, she wasn’t going to move until she had to.

“I need a ten minute break to restore blood flow,” she admits, and then almost flinches from the sudden intensity in Adam’s stare.

“Make it thirty,” he says, snapping his book shut, “and let’s see if we can give you a few tools to use when a fight is unavoidable.”

\--

This is a terrible idea, she thinks, shifting uneasily on the balls of her feet. Adam nods approvingly.

“Agility is important, and will enable you to adapt to the situation at hand.”

That does not make her less nervous. He makes her move her feet so that her left is leading, and stand with her arms up, fists close to her chin - to guard her throat, apparently. It probably wouldn’t have helped with Murphy, but she still grabs onto that idea; guard position. She pulls her hands in and feels like a turtle.

“Not so close,” he says, tapping one of her fists with an open hand and making her hit herself in the jaw. She’s intellectually aware that it was a gentle tap, but it still smarts.

She sighs and holds her arms a little farther from her body.

"Each supernatural has their own weaknesses, but if you don’t know the specifics, hit for the weak points in most creatures: eyes, throat, solar plexus, groin, knees." 

She nods - that much was covered in the basic defense training she’d had in the academy - and then stands awkwardly, feeling jittery and off-balance.

“Try to hit me,” he says, sounding entirely certain she won’t manage it. That’s fair; she agrees with that assessment of her chances. But also, she doesn’t… _want_ to hit him.

She probably wouldn’t want to hit anyone who wasn’t trying to hurt her or someone else, but she really doesn’t want to hit Adam. The moment stretches, and his brows lower.

“You won’t manage it,” he says. She nods again and jabs - not very hard or very fast, because she does not want to do it at all - at his solar plexus, since it’s at the center of his mass and Adam is broad-shouldered enough to present a large target. Except the instant her hand is in motion, Adam is a blur, and when she can see him again - before her arm is even fully extended - he’s at her shoulder, having completely avoided the attack.

She relaxes at this obvious confirmation she won’t - can’t - hurt him. She smiles, and punches out again, more serious this time.

He easily avoids that, too, and catches her wrist, using it to shove her away.

“I’m not sure this is teaching me anything,” she points out, once she’s caught her balance, “aside from ‘avoiding a fight is definitely the better choice.’”

“Ordinary attacks won’t work. You need to learn that.”

She pauses.

Then the point isn’t to try to hit him. This isn’t really about her combat abilities; it can’t be. She’s never going to be able to best him with pure force. Even if she were a stellar fighter, she couldn’t do that.

She jabs again, testing.

He fades to her left.

He tends to go to that side - she’s striking out with her right arm, her dominant arm. He’s taking advantage of the way she leaves the space open on her weaker side.

The next time she punches, it’s a feint; she throws her left leg out in a clumsy kick. He’s obviously not expecting it - probably because she only halfway expected it herself, and didn’t have her weight balanced properly to manage it. It’s not telegraphed clearly. A college friend once told her that complete neophytes are the most dangerous to spar against because they have no idea what they’re doing and can’t be predicted. Apparently that’s her advantage.

The retaliatory blow is definitely gentle, by Adam’s standards, because it doesn’t put her through a wall. It doesn’t even hurt, but she’s so off-balance from her kick that it knocks her flat on her back anyway.

“Ow,” she tells the ceiling, and doesn’t get up.

“Better,” he says. “Again.”

“No,” she says, staying put. “No, I think that’s enough.You’ve driven home your point; I need backup or I need to use my brain or I need to have a weapon that works on supernaturals, ideally all three, because otherwise I’m a liability.”

He said working with a human would only slow them down. Given how the fight with Murphy went - how useless she was for nearly the entire thing - she can see why.

His face interrupts her view of the ceiling, frowning.

“You need to learn to take a hit.”

She rolls to her feet, or tries; she falters at the discovery of what is definitely going to be an ugly bruise. What she actually needs is to avoid getting hit in the first place. She’s human; blows the vampires can just shrug off could probably kill her outright, and even if they don’t, well...

“The only reason I survived the fight with Murphy is that he wanted me alive. That won’t always be the case, but if it’s not, no amount of training will make me less breakable.”

She was very, very lucky that medical care arrived when it did, and they were able to give her a transfusion very quickly and get enough blood back into her to avoid any of the exciting effects of oxygen deprivation. Bodies are delicate machines and they need blood to function.

His jaw tightens.

She gingerly pokes her side.

“Ice pack,” she decides, “and then I’m gonna hit the books. They don’t hit back, and I like that better.”

\--

Adam is stiff and quiet, even more so than usual, when they get back to the library. She’s arranged her towel-wrapped bag of ice - because of course they don’t have actual ice packs, why would they? - against her side and rested the book on the armrest of the sofa, where there’s no danger of her dripping water on it. 

Nate comes in with a smile and a pot of tea and checks his steps, very abruptly, when he sees her little nest of self-pity - it really is only a bruise, but she did not want to give Adam an opening for insisting she acquire more of them to no purpose.

She smiles and forestalls the question she can see that he wants to ask;

“Hello, Nate. It’s always good to see you, but if you’ve brought refreshments to share, you are an angel of mercy.”

His smile brightens again, warm and welcoming.

(Her life would have been much easier, she reflects, if she’d managed to catch feelings for him, instead.)

“I did think you might need a break, but…”

“Oh, nothing’s broken this time,” she jokes, “just a bit of bruising.”

Nate chuckles, but Adam looks as if he’s about to snap in half. While she’s still trying to come up with a conversational redirect that might ease the tension, Nate walks closer to Adam and says something in an undertone far too quiet for human ears to catch the words.

Adam jerks his head in a sharp nod and strides out of the room.

Genevieve watches him go and then sighs, deflating.

Nate watches this with a small smile, grabbing a few books from the nearest pile and settling onto the opposite end of the sofa she’s installed herself on in a comfortable sprawl, looking perfectly at home and relaxed with a book in his hand. 

He says - quietly, presumably once Adam’s out of earshot, however far that is for a vampire - 

“He’ll be back in an hour or two, but I’d rather he take his frustrations out in the gym.”

“Rather than on the furniture or any of your books? That makes sense.”

Adam is a menace to innocent inanimate objects everywhere, in her experience. She bites her lip, but finally asks,

“Why is he…?”

Upset seems too mild, but she doesn’t understand where the tension came from well enough to label it anything else.

Nate uses a finger to mark his place - already several pages in - and gives her his full attention.

“He wants you to be safe.”

She chuckles a little, expecting a punchline, but Nate frowns. Oh.

He’s serious.

Her heart feels like it turns a somersault in her chest. She puts a hand over it like that’ll muffle the sound of her pulse loudly advertising to all and sundry that she’s more than a little twitterpated and reads too much into that admission.

Of course he wants her to be safe; keeping her alive is part of his job. He’s said as much himself; it doesn’t mean anything more than that.

It doesn’t mean what she wants it to mean.

She looks away.

Nate pours her a cup of tea so she doesn’t have to shift the ice pack, placing it in easy reach on the table.

\--

Nate stays very still when he’s reading, except when he switches out for a new book, so when his head goes up, she looks up as well. Adam is standing in the doorway again, looking less like he wants to break something in half. She has no idea how long he’s been there; it could have been three seconds or thirty minutes, because she hasn’t looked up in about eighty pages.

He actually looks kind of softly fond, taking in the pair of them - but of course he does. He and Nate are best friends. They have been, for… decades? Centuries? 

She knows her own smile must be just shy of gooey, but… it’s sweet that they’re such good friends, that time has done nothing but strengthen that bond.

Adam doesn’t say anything, just takes a book and settles into an armchair across from them, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. He looks contented, now. Relaxed.

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him so at ease.

She really likes it. Her idiot heart must do something to give her away again, because Adam glances up and meets her eye.

“Something wrong, Detective?”

Her cheeks heat at being caught out, but she smiles, tentatively.

“Ah, no, just... It’s nice to see you relax a little.”

His shoulders come up, at that, like she’s insulted all the ease right back out of him. It seems like she only ever says the wrong thing to him, when usually she’s so good with words. She can’t find a pattern to it, even though she’s usually so good at seeing them. 

She doesn’t like to fight. She’s not good at it. And it seems like she’s no good at this, either.

She drops her eyes, curls a little tighter in on herself, and tries to go back to her book. Research, at least, she can do.


	2. In The Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Day 6 of Wayhaven Week 2020. Prompt: Nightmare.  
> A rewrite of the nightmare at the warehouse.

A glint of fangs, of too-avid eyes, bright against the darkness;

_“Have you missed me, Detective?”_

She tries to recoil and can’t. Trapped. She thrashes against the constriction, desperate to yank free, breath coming in shallow, strangled sobs. It’s not until she’s standing on trembling legs with cold air turning her clammy sweat frigid on her skin that she realizes where she is. 

She’s in the warehouse. She’s protected. She ought to feel safe here, if she can feel safe anywhere.

She knows that, intellectually. Her pounding heart says her limbic system doesn’t believe it. It hasn’t really believed it in months, not in the quiet hours when she’s alone.

“Just a nightmare,” she tells herself. It isn’t true, though. Her voice shakes, giving away the falsehood.

Her subconscious is drawing on real memories for these nightly torments, and it’ll keep happening until she processes what happened to her. And she’s trying, but…

She rubs her arms, trying to chafe warmth into them. She can still see Murphy’s face looming out of the dark, teeth bared in a smile that was all the more terrifying for being almost affable. The nightmare refreshed her terror, but it didn’t create it. 

She feels cold and shaky, and - in the dark, in the quiet - very, vulnerably alone.

She heads for the bathroom, splashes water on her face, and tries to meet her eyes in the mirror. They’re drawn instead to the pale scars on her neck. She’s looking forward to fall, when she’ll have an excuse to wear scarves. Maybe someday the marks will be so faint she won’t see them at all. Maybe someday she’ll have recovered enough not to care, even if they don’t fade.

‘Someday’ seems very far away tonight.

For all the scars he left, Murphy wanted her alive. Her suffering was incidental, not the point. She’ll have to face worse. Maybe soon.

She sighs, and her breath shakes on the exhale. Maybe she’ll go to the training room; she could do a little yoga, try to stretch the stress out of her muscles and get her breathing under control. There’s still more than an hour until dawn; time to get in a catnap, at least, if she can just find enough tranquility to be able to fall asleep. 

\--

Sounds slow her steps as she heads towards the training room; sharp breaths and the occasional heavy impact that travels through the floor. The doors are partly open, so she peers inside. Moonlight filtering in through the narrow windows at the top of the walls barely illuminates the interior - but then, Unit Bravo can see in the dark. It makes sense that they wouldn’t turn on the lights when she and her mother and their diurnal vision don’t need to be accommodated.

Motion draws her eye to the source of the sounds, and she finds herself relaxing automatically. Even in the dark, she knows his shape.

Adam.

He’s throwing punches and kicks, running through what must be some kind of kata, from the smooth, easy way the motions flow together and he doesn’t seem to need to think about what comes next. She can feel the breeze when one leg lashes out in a roundhouse kick, almost too fast to see. That must be why he’s not using the training dummies; she can’t imagine they’d survive that kind of force.

Then he turns towards her and stills.

She freezes automatically, but for all he’s in moonlight and she’s in the shadowed gloom of the hallway, he must be able to see her clearly.

“Is something wrong, Detective?”

His voice echoes around her, enveloping her; it’s so comforting she only realizes it’s drawing her farther into the room, unconsciously seeking more of that comfort, after several steps. 

She rubs her neck, more keenly aware than usual of the way the surface skin still doesn’t quite register sensation. Nerve damage. She scratches at it, like a child prodding at a numbed lip, and doesn’t feel that, either, as anything more than pressure. A month later, it’s still strange. 

“Nightmares,” she answers. “About Murphy.”

Adam’s voice is soft when he says, “I see.” 

She remembers the way Adam had stood beside her a week ago and somehow managed to emanate a steadying aura that made her nerves melt away like mist after the memories made her freeze. Even right after the… transfusion, Adam’s presence, his touch, had been enough to make her feel safe and comforted even though she was in danger and in pain.

He still does that. The setting doesn’t seem to matter. He doesn’t do it on purpose, she knows, but that doesn’t seem to matter, either.

She tucks herself onto a nearby bench, hopefully out of the way of his training regimen, a concession to the heaviness invading her limbs as the residual adrenaline of the nightmare fades into exhaustion. She’s still too twitchy and keyed up to sleep, of course, but the acute fear is passing, hurried along by Adam’s proximity. Sitting jostles her bruise, but even that is grounding; the only real pain she feels, tonight, is something she got by accident, not something inflicted on purpose by someone who wanted to hurt her.

_"I would prefer to take on the dangers of this supernatural world than subject you to any horrors ever again."_

She smiles a little at the remembered words. They don’t mean what she wants them to mean, even if he does want her safe, but… maybe he’ll let her stay for a while, if she keeps out of the way. He doesn’t go back to his training, though, even once she’s curled small on the bench, so she asks,

“You couldn’t sleep, either?”

She suspects it’s not that; he seems too alert for someone involuntarily forgoing sleep.

He shrugs, close enough to confirmation of that suspicion, and moves to stand closer beside her. It’s just moving into comfortable conversational distance, she knows, but she’s keenly aware of the way her heart trips a little quicker, of the stupid surge of hope that comes every time he has a choice and chooses to move towards her instead of away. The movement puts him squarely in a beam of moonlight, and she’s struck all over again by the angles and planes of his face. 

He’s beautiful. 

She knows she’s not the only one who thinks so, understands that he doesn’t welcome that kind of appreciation, but even pushing the awareness down, sometimes he makes her breath catch. Letting herself really look for a moment, she can see a sheen of sweat on his pale skin, and she can hear his breathing when so little seems to elevate it. He must have been in here for quite some time, to be showing signs of exertion.

Her own pulse still hasn’t slowed at all, but it’s fluttering, now, not racing in terror.

“I don’t sleep all that much,” he tells her. “It is less necessary for vampires.”

She nods. 

“And you can see in the dark, too. I forget, sometimes, that you all have so many fringe benefits on top of the immortality.”

“It is inadvisable to forget about that part of us.”

His voice is nothing but amused, but she still finds herself hunching against the disapprobation in the words.

‘Forget’ isn’t quite right, anyway. She’s vaguely aware of it - that Farah can get a read on people’s emotions, and Morgan gets overstimulated by things her mortal senses barely register. But it’s just… part of them. As a diurnal mortal who usually interacts with them during the day, it isn’t usually in the forefront of her mind that they’re well-adapted as ‘creatures of the night.’

That’s probably why they expected her to be afraid. But she wasn’t, and it’s too late, now; she never will be. She’ll be afraid of individuals, sure - she’s terrified of Murphy - but Farah is sweet and funny, Nate is steady and kind, Morgan is grumpy and fiercely loyal, and Adam--

Adam makes her feel so safe she sometimes forgets to be afraid of anything at all.

“Do you ever forget? That you’re a vampire, I mean.”

“Never,” he answers instantly. “And I wouldn’t wish to.”

She considers that. What would it be like? Is it an estrangement from yourself, an inability to relax and just exist? Or is it something else? She doesn’t really think about herself as human, even though she knows now that the spectrum of sentient creatures is far broader than she ever suspected. Maybe she’d think about what she is more if she were something else, if she’d been changed from what she was born as? But surely he’s had time to get used to it. For being a vampire to become something normal, something taken for granted.

Or at least something that isn’t a constant, obtrusive part of his experience of the world.

“Have you been a vampire for very long?”

Farah said he was old, but what does that mean to people who can live forever?

He sighs, and then sits down beside her, leaning his head back against the wall. She tries not to stare too much at the curve of his shoulder or the angle of his jaw or the decisive lines of his profile. He’s like a feral cat; if she pays too much attention, he’ll either tense up or withdraw entirely.

And in the darkness, he’ll see her staring far more clearly than she’ll be able to see him. She directs her eyes out into the dark gym. Normally, she’d probably find it spooky, her eyes creating strange shapes from the shadows - but with Adam beside her, it’s just a room. A comfortable one, even, because he’s in it.

“I suppose it’s fair for you to know more about us, now that you’re part of this team,” he muses, and his voice - quiet in the dark, so close - makes her shiver a little before the words really register.

That would be an excellent justification for prying, she thinks wryly, but it isn’t accurate. She just… 

“I’d like to know more about you.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence and then she has to fight down a flush as she realizes how that sounded. She hadn’t meant to state it so baldly - hadn’t really meant to say it out loud at all. But then, she never means to say things like that. She has, in fact, tried to stop, because he never appreciates hearing them. He gets stiff and closed off and pulls away, every time.

But he makes her feel safe, and sometimes that feeling of safety makes her stupid.

He tenses, as expected, and she curls her shoulders in; she knows what’s coming, some kind of deflection or an outright rejection. She can’t really brace for it physically, but her body still tries. But this time, for some reason, he relaxes - and when she dares a glance over, she can just make out the curve of his smile in the dark.

“I have been a vampire for a very long time, yes.”

He doesn’t offer more, but… if he’s not shrugging her off...

“How long is ‘very long’? The French Revolution? The Reformation? The Hundred Years’ War?”

He seems to consider, but doesn’t address any of the temporal landmarks.

“Over nine hundred years.”

  
That encompasses everything she’d mentioned and then some.

“You’ve lived through so much history…” she marvels, but he only chuckles.

“I may have lived that long, but I’m afraid history has pretty much passed me by with neither of us paying much heed to the other.”

She sighs. She’d have liked to ask what he’d seen, what he’d thought about it. She’d hoped for something that might offer safe and relatively neutral conversational ground. Not the present, where she cares too much, and not his own era, which is clearly a source of pain. So often she thinks they’re on stable footing and then somehow she trips a landmine in the middle of what she’d thought was safe ground.

“I’m sure Nate would be more than happy to fill you in on many details in my stead,” he offers, as if she only wanted information on the past, not his specific perspective and an excuse to talk to him. Maybe she can do that anyway, though. That wasn’t redirection, not really; he’s trying to give her what he thinks she’s asking for, at least right now.

She considers the timeline. 900 years…

“The first Crusade? The Battle of Hastings?”

He chuckles again, and she luxuriates in the sound because it says that right now, he’s enjoying having her around.

“My father was a Norman conqueror who settled in England and was given land and a lordship.”

Of course he was. Of course Adam was a noble.

She remembers the images from the mirror, a longer-haired Adam in armor, surrounded by flames and corpses, with tears tracking down his cheeks. A little later, the Adam she knows, saying, unconvincingly, ‘memories cannot hurt me.’

She waits a moment, but nothing more is forthcoming.

“You don’t like to remember your past, do you.”

She says it in a soft voice, pitched low; easy to listen to, nonthreatening. Maybe it’s a little unfair of her to use her training this way, but... she wants him to keep talking. She wants it so badly.

(Did she want to go back to sleep, earlier? Who needs sleep? She just needs this moment to last as long as possible; Adam, relaxed and open and speaking like she’s someone he might almost enjoy talking to, telling her things about himself just because she wants to know.)

“My history was not an easy one. But one of the benefits of practical immortality is the time it gives you to grow numb to any tormenting memories.” He says it with an air of cold dismissiveness, but she thinks that’s pretense; there’s pain lurking in the set of his brows and the line of his mouth, even veiled by shadows.

He wants the past not to hurt, but it does. It still does. That’s why he tries so hard to be numb. She rubs her neck again. Maybe the wound itself doesn’t still hurt, or maybe he’s just telling himself it doesn’t, but either way… trauma lingers.

She looks at him, at the tension in his shoulders that betrays the ache he’s carrying and trying not to feel. She wishes she were brave enough to reach for his hand. She wishes she thought he’d let her, or that it would help.

“Adam--”

He interrupts, tone clipped, eyes snapping away from hers,

“I think that’s enough history for today. You don’t want to know everything about me.”

He pushes himself up to leave.

Landmine, she thinks, resigned. She’s abruptly aware that it’s cold in the room, and wraps her arms around herself.

He’s wrong; she does want to know everything about him. He doesn’t want her to know, but he never says that. He says she should think he’s a monster. He says it’s safer if she does or thinks or feels a different way than she does. 

He makes it about her, but it isn’t, not really. Her thoughts and feelings aren’t the issue. She’s kept them to herself, as much as she can. She knows they’re unwelcome; he’s made that clear.

She just wishes he’d stop telling her not to have them. She can’t help it. She’s only human.

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? She’s human.

“I’m not trying to pry,” she says. “But… you’re wrong.”

She looks up and even in the dark, even night-blind, it’s the easiest thing in the world to find the shape of him and meet his eyes.

“I do want to know everything about you. You don’t want me to. That’s… you can just say that, Adam. You can tell me the truth, but you don’t get to tell me what I feel.”

“You don’t understand,” he tells her.

“Then talk to me,” she says, knowing already that it’s a moonshot.

“I can’t!”

Tension fizzles in the air and it sparks something in her; she doesn’t mean to say this, either, but it slips out;

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

He grits out, “What does it matter?”

“Because I don’t understand,” she pleads. She wants to understand. If he’d just let her try--

“Then stay out of it!”

It’s like having a door slammed in her face, and it reminds her that she’s never been invited in at all, not really. Not with him. Farah and Nate were friendly from the first, and Morgan treats her like part of the team now, but Adam… 

_“Working with a human will only slow us down.”_

More recently, with a sneer that cut her to the quick, _"Not unless you change the human race."_

She doesn’t always understand him, but his dislike of humans has never been ambiguous.

The tension drops out of her all at once, because she’s too beaten-down and exhausted to keep it up. That’s her original problem solved, at least; she feels like she could sleep for a month. Shame coils in her stomach, heavy and cold and sour.

Whatever she feels, it doesn’t give her the right to keep pushing this.

She doesn’t even want to move. She could sleep right here on this bench. Just curl up and let herself stop feeling like this for a little while. Stop feeling at all.

She knows it’s absurd. It’s like having a compulsion to touch the stove even knowing it’ll burn her hand every time. She keeps reaching out anyway.

“I don’t want to fight,” she says, too tired to hide that every time he snaps at her it leaves a bruise. To his credit, that seems to take most of the fight out of him, too; she looks up when he says, more softly,

“I know, it’s just that I…”

He trails off, and she realizes... he’s staring at her mouth. Her lips part slightly, and for a weightless moment it seems like he feels it, too--

And then he steps away. Looks away.

“You should try to get some sleep,” he tells the wall.

She closes her eyes and summons every ounce of her will to get herself on her feet again. She walks back to her room with careful, even steps, not letting herself dart away the way she wants.

Her breath is unsteady, again, but not from fear. She gets the door closed behind her before she knuckles away the tears and asks herself, abruptly furious,

“How hard is it to remember he doesn’t like you very much?”

He’s made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t like humans. He’s devoted to his team, and dedicated to his job, and he respects her mother; that’s plenty of reasons to explain why he puts up with her. Why he might even be nice sometimes.

It’s not anything more than that, and it’s pure wishful thinking to imagine otherwise. Kindness doesn’t mean he likes her. She should know that better than anyone.

As for the rest? After tonight, she has an explanation for that, too. He’s attracted to her. That much is mutual, but he doesn’t want it to be. He’s attracted to her, and he _hates_ it.

There’s watery pre-dawn light filtering in through the windows, but she climbs back into bed, anyway. She draws the quilt over her head and curls up tight, arms wrapped around herself, and closes her eyes.

Eventually her breathing evens out again. Her sleep is mercifully dreamless.


	3. Only Human

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Day 5 of Wayhaven Week 2020. Prompt: Guilt  
> A rewrite of the fight to rescue Sanja and the aftermath.

They don’t have a terribly solid plan for confronting the Trappers, but whatever she expected, it’s definitely not what they get;

“Forget the fortune teller! We only need her.”

Several Trappers who aren’t actively engaged with Adam and Farah turn towards her with a too-familiar hungry gleam, so much like Murphy’s avaricious stare that it freezes her in place. Her throat tightens, muscles tensing, fear a cold tangle in her gut. She tries to focus; the fear makes them seem like an army, but there’s only five.

That’s more than enough to overpower her, though. She backs away as the man paces closer, now flanked by allies. He stoops down to retrieve one of the electrical weapons the majority of the Trappers seem to be armed with, and blue sparks crackle at the end. He points it towards her like a taunt. She can’t fight them. If she tries, she’ll lose. Her eyes dart around the room, looking for something, anything, she can use.

The man smirks at her, mocking,

"What do you think you can do, huh? You're just human.”

Human.

_Working with a human will just slow us down._

Her gaze flashes to Adam, across the room, easily engaging six more of the Trappers and holding his own. He was right. She does slow them down; she’s a weak link.

But...

_Use another sense._

She chose research because she’s never going to be an asset in a fight, but she has other strengths. Sometimes she slows them down. She can’t deny that. But sometimes a different perspective is just what’s needed.

She keeps backing away, but with more purpose, now.

“You’re right,” she agrees, keeping her voice even and her words slow - because as long as she’s talking, the Trappers are likely to keep listening, are less likely to rush her. “I am only human--” She’s where she needs to be, now; she lets the triumphant smile burst onto her face. “--but so are you.”

She hits the lights, then has to dive to one side to avoid the sparking blue that arcs towards the place where she was just standing. All she can see is a few crackling lights in the dark, but she hears a tumult of confusion and panic, followed by a rapid series of pained noises.

The sparking prod arcs back the other direction after the first swing misses, and she stumbles back again--

Which must give one of the Trappers an opening to hit the switch. The lights come up, blinding; one of her arms flies up to shield her face as she winces away from the brightness and the attack she expects to follow it.

Instead, there is a rush of air, a quick, staccato series of thumps, then four distinct thuds. When she looks up, she sees a familiar gray coat and feels abruptly, entirely safe. When she looks down, she sees her primary attacker in the dirt, flanked by his accomplices. Adam glances back at her, and she finds herself smiling up at him. 

“Thank you.”

He opens his mouth to respond, when a yelp from across the room draws their attention.

Genevieve cries,

“Farah!”

Adam’s reaction is much more useful. He hurls a block of concrete across the room, knocking one of Farah’s attackers a full ten feet back. The Trapper slumps to the ground, clearly unconscious. Adam surges forward again, back into the fray, sending two of the others flying with the force of his charge.

One of the remaining Trappers stares around at her wounded friends, then flashes her attention back to Genevieve. Looking around… all of the Trappers still up are glancing at this woman even in the middle of a fight, even though she hasn’t gotten heavily involved in the fighting so far.

_Leader_ , Genevieve’s instincts say. When the woman lunges for her, she’s ready. A step to the side gives her an opening, and she jams her Volt into the Trapper’s side.

The woman drops, steam rising from her still form. 

Genevieve bites her lip, wishing she felt triumphant instead of faintly ill.

When she looks up, her stomach sinks even further. Reinforcements have clearly filtered in while she was distracted; there’s enough of them, now, that Adam is being backed into a corner, every one of his attackers armed with one of those terrifying electrical implements. Every blow that gets past his guard sends blue electricity crackling over his skin. His teeth are clenched. The lines on his brow say it’s pain rather than resolve.

Genevieve takes an instinctive step towards him when Sanja cries out, a desperate, hoarse scream.

Adam catches Genevieve’s eye and yells,

“Save her!”

Anything else he might have said is cut off as a Trapper jams one of the prods beneath his chin and discharges it.

He must know she’s about to ignore that and head for him, because he just about manages to point at Sanja, reinforcing the point. Genevieve follows the gesture, and--

They’re going to kill her. It’s obvious; the Trappers are only a few feet from her, now, wielding their prods with malicious, murderous intent. They know they’ve lost; they’re trying to make sure no one wins.

There are tears springing to Genevieve’s eyes even as she turns. Her Volt has to be almost out of juice, by now, but it’s enough to take down the first of the Trappers drawing in around Sanja. The second lashes out at Genevieve, but they’re both distracted when Farah yells,

“Hey!”

Another one of the electrical prods arcs through the air practically into her hand. She registers that it isn’t sparking, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to swing it like a tennis racket into the side of the second Trapper’s head.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re supposed to do with those,” Farah laughs, already at her back, where they can guard each other. Neither of them are fighters, but they _are_ friends, and apparently that’s enough to make them a fairly formidable team.

Then Morgan bowls into the middle of the remaining group, sending three of them down at once, with Nate striding in to back her up, and the second the immediate threat is under control, Genevieve is moving, ducking around the fighting as best she can to stumble her way through to the far side of the room, where she last saw Adam. 

Where she can’t see him anymore. 

One of the remaining enemies must graze her; she’s being crushed for a moment, not enough room inside her skin for everything that belongs there, muscles twisted and screaming. When awareness comes back, she’s on her knees. She grasps at her deadened arm - it feels like they got her in the shoulder - and lurches back to her feet, because she _can_ see Adam, now.

He’s the only thing she can see. 

He’s collapsed on the concrete, not moving.

She stumbles and falls, again, close enough that it doesn’t matter. Her left arm is still dead, but her right reaches for his shoulder, shaking it as though he’ll just… wake up.

“Adam,” she begs, more than half a sob.

The electricity has left angry red burns and dark bruising, stark against his pale skin. None of it is healing. His breathing is irregular and weak.

“Please,” she begs, her hand clenching on one of the lapels of his coat, the wool singed and scorched. “Please wake up--”

She flinches away from a touch on her shoulder, the side that’s still somewhere between half-numbed and aching.

"We have to get him out of here."

She looks up at Nate, barely comprehending his words for a moment.

"You have to let him go," Nate whispers.

She looks at her fingers, the knuckles blanched bloodless where her hand is clenched tight around his coat. She manages, finally, to straighten her fingers enough to pull away. The second she does, Nate reaches down to grip Adam’s arm and heave him over his shoulder. They’re gone in an instant.

Genevieve doesn’t move.

_Working with a human will only slow us down_.

He’d wanted to teach her to defend herself, and she hadn’t listened.

Would it have gone differently, if he hadn’t needed to rescue her? If Farah hadn’t? If they’d had better backup?

If it had been the four of them down here, not two and her, they’d have been fine. _He_ would be fine.

She has enough feeling back in her arm to put both hands up to her face, taking a shuddering breath and pressing her fists against her eyes.

“Hey,” Farah says quietly, from beside her. Genevieve doesn’t move. If she moves, she’ll start sobbing. Or she’ll start screaming. She can keep it from spilling over, but only if she doesn’t move. “Adam’s really tough,” Farah continues, but her voice is too subdued, almost shaky. “He’ll be okay.”

Genevieve makes herself look up, sees a twin to her own heartsore fear in Farah’s amber eyes, and falls onto Farah’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around the other woman and clinging, desperately. Farah strokes a hand down Genevieve’s back, murmuring something quiet, soothing. She doesn’t recognize the language, but then, she’s having trouble making sense of her mother-tongue right now around the pulsing insistence of _only slow us down_ repeating over and over in her head. After a minute, she manages to make herself let go, to accept a hand up.

She stumbles towards her car, once they’re out, and Morgan huffs out a deeply aggrieved sigh and grabs her shoulder, checking the motion.

Farah nods agreement, saying,

“Yeah, no, you’re not driving, you’re a mess.”

Morgan ends up giving her a piggy-back ride. In a better frame of mind, in daylight, it might have been a fun experience. Right now, she’s just grateful; it’s faster than taking her car. She clings to Morgan’s shoulders and mumbles,

“Thank you.”

They’re still treating her like part of the team. She doesn’t deserve it.

_\--only slow us down._

He was right.

\--

Farah stays sitting next to Genevieve with an arm around her shoulders, like she knows the simple animal comfort of it is the only thing keeping Genevieve from going to pieces. Morgan fidgets, fiddling with the cords at her wrists and picking at upholstery and shifting position twice a minute, while Nate rubs at his face and paces in front of the fireplace, too agitated to be still.

Genevieve can’t imagine having the energy to pace. The room is dark, with just a few small slivers of dawn slipping past the curtains. She’s grateful for the dim light; it makes everything feel a little to the left of real, just enough so that she can pretend this isn’t happening.

Farah shivers, and that’s what finally breaks her out of her own head. She’s not the only one who--

She’s not the only one who cares. She shifts around to return the embrace and rubs Farah’s back, wishing she could project love and comfort and then remembering that the vampires can sense feelings. So… maybe she can. So she digs past her overwhelmed terror and heartbreak to find how much she loves her friend, thinks of smiles and teasing and concern and ‘I wish unicorns were real’ and cups that in her hands and focuses on it, instead of… everything else. Farah leans harder against her with a wobbly breath.

The door creaks open, and all of their attention snaps to it.

"Any news?" Nate croaks out.

Her mother steps through the doorway, weariness dragging at her normally sharp posture. She shakes her head. There’s a deep furrow between her brows.

"The doctor is still with him."

Genevieve sort of tunes out the rest of the conversation, although she’s vaguely aware that Sanja is apparently well-off enough to be moving under her own power.

Then her mother moves closer, looking at her. Genevieve forces her head up. Rebecca glances at Farah, like she’s not sure she should say anything in front of the others. It’s important, though - and the others will need to know.

“The Trappers knew me,” she says, aware that her voice is rough and flat and unlike her, and not able to care. “They said… ‘The blood test results, they were hers. Forget the fortune teller - we only need her.’”

She’ll probably care more about that later; it ought to scare her that people like that might be… hunting her.

Her mother looks worried enough for both of them.

“Only the Agency knew about the results.”

Genevieve shrugs listlessly, but her mother’s eyes drop and there’s something like heartbreak in the lines of her frowning mouth. Genevieve pats Farah and then pulls away and gets to her feet so she can hug her mother, too.

“I’m fine, Mum,” she says, her voice breaking a little on the words.

She is fine. She barely even got hurt.

It seems so unfair.

Her mother shakes a little, and Genevieve squeezes a little tighter.

“I wish you didn’t have to go through all of this,” Rebecca whispers. The terror, and the nightmares, and being hunted -- yeah. She wishes she could avoid that part, too.

Would she trade it, though? Knowing there’s so much more wonder in the world than she’d supposed, meeting Unit Bravo, meeting--

No.

No, she can’t regret any of it.

(But if he dies--)

“It’s how it is,” she tells her mother, and manages to summon up a smile as she pulls away. “We’ll deal with what we have to.”

Her mother’s phone pulls her out of the room, but Elidor ducks in before she’s out of earshot, before Genevieve has done more than half-turn back to the sofa.

"Commanding Agent du Mortain is going to be just fine," Elidor tells them, and her knees go watery underneath her, but Farah is right there, suddenly, keeping her on her feet. "The doctor is with him now if a couple of you want to go up."

Nate is the first one out the door, but only because Genevieve stops to press Elidor’s hand and say, so grateful she feels unsteady on her feet, 

“Thank you.”

\--

Nate is talking to a grey-coated doctor, when she catches up. The doctor frowns, but it reads more as frustration than as fear. That makes sense; Adam must be a very frustrating patient.

She almost wants to smile at that thought. Moving into earshot, she hears the doctor saying,

"--sedate him with diluted DMB, as he refused to stay in bed and let his injuries heal properly. I've never had a patient so insufferable."

Genevieve does laugh, then, and looks at Nate, who meets her eyes with a small but sincere answering smile.

That’s enough to convince both of them that Adam really is going to be alright. If he has the energy to be stubborn, he’s going to be just fine.

"If you want to talk to him, I suggest you do so now before the DMB knocks him out,” the doctor tells them.

"Thank you, Dr. Tuft," Nate says with a relieved sigh. Genevieve bites her lip. Nate is Adam’s best friend. 

“You should--” she starts, just as Nate turns to her and says,

“Why don’t--”

They both laugh and he pats her arm.

"Why don't you go on in? I should let the others know the situation."

She knows she must be giving him an entirely gormless wide-eyed look, but he doesn’t laugh at her, just smiles knowingly. Well. She knew she hadn’t been… subtle about it. She’d tried, but she’s known there was no succeeding.

Her face warms with embarrassment. She’s not going to reject the offer, though.

“I… I appreciate it. Thank you,” she mumbles, and knocks quietly on the door before letting herself in.

The room is dark, but what she can make out is simple, functional, with nothing decorative or bright about it, nothing to personalize it.

It’s kind of heartbreaking; they live so long. Has there never been anything, in all that time, that he wanted to keep?

But that thought gets knocked out of her head when she sees the figure tucked under the sheets on the large bed on the other side of the room and meets Adam’s piercing green gaze. He’s wrapped in bandages and trying to hide his discomfort, but there are fine lines of pain around his eyes and by his mouth, and her heart twists in agonized self-recrimination.

She moves forward and the words spill out;

“I'm so sorry, Adam."

He tilts his head, like he doesn’t understand. 

"For what?"

“This is my fault,” she says, because it is.

He said she’d slow them down, and she did. A vampire would have been able to save Sanja and keep him safe. Even a more competent human might have been able--

"No." His voice is firm, certain. "You did as I asked, and I am grateful for it."

She blinks at him. It’s true that she did what he said, but--

"You did as I wanted. Did what was needed." His eyes scrunch a little with a smile he must be suppressing; it doesn’t show anywhere else, but his green eyes are warm. "You don't know how much that means to me in that situation."

She bites her lip, but it’s hard to blame herself quite so much in the face of his approval. It’s not forgiveness, but it’s almost better; it seems like it never even occurred to him to blame her, not for any of it.

She moves forward and, when he doesn’t tense at all, dares to settle on the edge of the bed.

“It worked,” she tells him, because if that was important, this will be, too; “Sanja is fine. Injured, but Agency medics are helping her.”

Adam relaxes, letting his head loll back against the pillows.

“At least we succeeded in that.”

She looks at him, at the bruising that still hasn’t quite faded even though she’s seen how fast he normally heals, and promises herself that next time, she’ll do better. He doesn’t blame her, and that is a relief, but she can’t help blaming herself.

“Thank you for listening to me, Detective,” he says after a moment.

“I always listen to you.” She blinks, startled and a little appalled by herself, and immediately drops her eyes so she won’t have to see him react to that. It’s true, but she hadn’t meant to say it. Her shoulders hunch.

She wants him to trust her. It’s humiliating to be so overt about it, because he’s taken pains to make it clear that he doesn’t, and has no intention of doing so.

  
Mercifully, a knock on the door interrupts before he can respond.

Doctor Tuft peers inside. "The sedative will be taking effect soon. We should let him rest."

Adam answers the doctor in an aggrieved growl, and Genevieve feels a little of her tension unspool again.

"I have no need for rest. As I have told you many times.”

She has to smile at the tone and at the words. It’s a relief to hear him… so much himself. Doctor Tuft is clearly not at all cowed. Instead, she narrows her eyes. 

"Don't make me send Elidor in there to pin you down until you fall asleep."

Adam doesn’t argue further, just huffs - but it’s a tired sound, and his eyes are starting to go heavy-lidded. The pain lines are easing off of his face, too, so Genevieve can’t be sorry that the sedative is starting to work.

Especially since it spares her having to hear another rejection. She knows. She’s been listening. She doesn’t mean to keep saying things that are so overt they merit rejection, but it’s not like she has much practice in censoring expressions of affection.

She should have learned, though, at least by now. It’s been months. Romantic interest is different than friendly overtures. Far more uncomfortable, when it’s unrequited. For both of them.

The doctor leaves, so she ought to excuse herself, as well. But… this much, at least, is surely allowed;

"Make sure you rest and heal," she murmurs, and hesitates, but she can still see him lying on the floor, unmoving, battered. "Seeing you hurt, Adam…I can't." Her fingers knot in her lap.

Please, she wants to beg, don’t do that to me again.

But that’s not her place.

She wants to reach out and stroke his cheek, to reassure herself that the bruises and cuts are healing where they haven’t already been erased - but that’s not her place, either.

She makes herself meet his gaze. His green eyes are a little unfocused, now, but he’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before. It’s so much more open and relaxed than he normally looks, at least when she’s around to see it.

“What is it?”

She realizes, abruptly, that she’s leaning in, caught by that look, but before she can pull back, his hand reaches up. She goes still, trembling, and his fingertips glide along her jaw, her chin, her lower lip.

Her breath stops.

“Tu… omnia…”

It’s barely more than a mumble, and his hand drops from her face as his eyes fall closed.

She manages, at long last, to take a shaky breath, and shakes her head.

That’s not what he meant. She misunderstood. He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t say that. Not to her.

But…

‘You’re everything.”

She pushes unsteadily to her feet and hesitates. She doesn’t want to leave. She lets herself stroke hesitant fingers over his jaw and presses one quick, careful kiss to his brow.

“Sleep well,” she whispers, and heads out of the room, barely able to hear her own words or her footsteps over the jackhammer beat of her heart.

Could he mean it? There have been a dozen times she thought, perhaps...

_I dwell in Possibility_ , she thinks, giddy and half-nonsensical. If he meant it… if he _meant it_...

Perhaps.

That word seems so much more hopeful than it did yesterday.


	4. Mending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Day 7 of Wayhaven Week 2020. Prompt: Mend  
> I noticed that Adam’s coat gets damaged in the Trapper fight, but he’s wearing it again in the carnival epilogue apparently none the worse for wear… so I made up a very fluffy headcanon about it.

She drifts down the corridors of the warehouse, feeling almost weightless. She’d been convinced she was imagining things. Oh, there had been a few moments, but almost nothing she could interpret as a true cause for hope rather than wishful thinking. Encouragement has been rare and uncertain, and rejections have been unambiguous. But she didn’t imagine this; his hand on her face, fingertips brushing over her trembling lips, and words she wasn’t meant to understand but which resonate inside her like her heart is a bell, struck and ringing, ringing.

Tu omnia. You are everything.

It shifts her perspective entirely. Whatever this is, for him, it can’t be anything so simple as an unwelcome physical attraction. You don’t say things like that from a place of indifference, however compromised you might be.

She’s still wandering about in a buoyantly befuddled daze when she finds Nate frowning over Adam’s peacoat. The sight brings her back to earth rather abruptly; the coat, singed and scorched, reminds her that she heard those words because he was so badly hurt they drugged him. That he was so badly hurt none of them were sure he’d survive.

That she let it happen.

He told her to, yes, and he doesn’t blame her, but that doesn’t erase the fact that she blames herself.

Nate glances up to give her an absent smile of greeting, clearly preoccupied, and then looks down again, brushing over one of the singed holes in the coat.

“I’m not sure it’s going to be salvageable,” he says, sighing. 

“May I?”

She doesn’t realize she means to say it until she already has, but Nate hands over the coat easily enough.

She traces thoughtful fingers over the damage and considers. It shouldn’t be hard to get gray roving - Wayhaven’s little fiber arts store might have what she needs and if not, well, she has access to the many and varied wonders of the internet. The heathering will make it harder to match exactly, but there aren’t any large holes, so as long as she can get close enough to the base gray...

“I think I can fix it,” she says, looking up, and Nate gives her a warm smile.

\--

The roving on offer, naturally, won’t do at all; she’s not sure how much better a vampire’s vision is than hers, but she’d lay odds that if something looks a bit off to her it will fairly scream that wrongness to keener senses. She ends up buying a skein of yarn that is neither too blue nor too brown and then spends the evening untwisting the strands, separating out the fibers, and untwisting some more. She doesn’t have anything to card the resulting tufts with, so she ends up pinching them apart into fluff for a few hours, putting her favorite movie on for background noise and something to keep her brain minimally engaged while her hands take care of the work.

She’ll be finding stray gray fibers stuck to things for the next month, probably, but c’est la vie.

Once she’s done with that, she takes another look at the coat. The lining is singed, too, with a few holes burnt clear through, and she spends a moment looking at them with her heart breaking. She strokes her hand over it, feeling the damage and breathing through the self-recrimination. He _thanked_ her. That almost makes it worse, even as it’s an incredible relief.

She let this happen, and he thanked her for it. She breathes through the surge of self-hatred, but there’s less than she expects. It’s hard to hate herself in the face of Adam saying,

_You did as I wanted. Did what was needed. You don't know how much that means to me in that situation._

She doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t need to; she doesn’t know how to love without listening. She tried to keep her feelings to herself because she’d thought them unwelcome. She’s still going to try not to push.

But she’s going to keep listening. Because maybe someday he’ll say it again. Maybe next time, he’ll intend for her to understand it.

She catches herself smiling and shakes her head. There’s work to do.

The lining presents more of a problem than the wool exterior, because she can’t just felt silk back together. Replacing, then. There’s some comfort in the realization, as she works, that it would have needed replacing anyway; the silk was showing strain in places, starting to pull, especially along the shoulder seams and below the arms. Probably because human tailoring wasn’t really intended to accommodate someone who picks up and throws trees.

She thinks about the pleased smile she’d dismissed as her own wistful heart making too much of a trick of the light. She’s willing to consider, now, that she may have been right, before she talked herself out hoping.

_"I'm not 'stuck' with you. I'm pleased to be the one on this mission…with you."_

It seems like Farah was right. Maybe he meant that. Maybe he is glad to see her, when she’s there.

She’s still pretty confident he doesn’t enjoy the sensation, but maybe he just needs time to relax into it. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who resigns himself to a fall without trying to catch himself, and apparently that applies to metaphorical feelings-based falls as well as the literal kind.

The coat mostly carries the sulfurous smell of burnt hair (it’s not a surprise, since wool is in fact hair, but it is nonetheless quite horrible), after its misadventure. Beneath that, weirdly, the dominant scent is washing powder. There is a hint of the cologne he was wearing that night, though - and around the collar, it smells of him.

She has to put the coat down and turn away for a moment out of sheer mortification, when she catches that thought. She’d been enveloped in the scent when he wrapped the coat around her shoulders the night they’d all patrolled Wayhaven. She’d been too aware of his proximity, of the weight of the body-warm wool, of her heart beating hummingbird-quick in her chest. There’s no one here to see, this time, so she presses her palms to her burning cheeks trying to cool them.

She shouldn’t care. She never would have, before; oh, she would notice if Tina loaned her a scarf to jazz up an outfit or if she borrowed Verda’s coat for a run to Haley’s, but while she knows those familiar and comforting smells, they’ve never preoccupied her thoughts this way, never made her want to set her nose against the fabric.

“Is that creepy?” she asks the air, not expecting a response. The answer is probably ‘yes,’ in any case. She goes to the kitchen for a glass of water to remove the temptation to do it anyway. When she gets back, it’s easier to resist.

Hydration is magic. Not just for her, either; a little spot-cleaning takes care of the worst of the blackened and singed spots.

The remaining scorch marks - those that would not yield to increasingly ungentle persuasion - are carefully snipped away from the rest of the fabric before she sets to felting. And felting. And felting.

This looked easier on youtube.

She frowns, stroking over the first mend. It’s not a perfect match; the coat itself is a heathered wool, with lighter and darker striations. It’s close, though. Close enough she wouldn’t notice if she weren’t looking. And the patches should be small enough to avoid notice, at least from human eyes. Will that be good enough? Maybe she’ll ask Nate, before she risks returning it.

Then again, maybe not Nate; Nate will be polite. Morgan will tell her the truth, but she’ll probably also say that she’s being an idiot. Which is fair; that is _also_ probably true. Farah...

She considers Farah’s bright grin when she suggested ‘a couple on a date’ as their cover, and the encouragement she offered when Genevieve was accepting that the situation was hopeless and her feelings were unrequited.

They told her, months ago, that vampires could read emotions to some extent. She’s learned, since, that Farah is the best of them at it.

She smiles a little. She’s prepared to take that as a hopeful sign; Farah is her friend. She wouldn’t push Genevieve to break her own heart. And it wouldn’t even occur to Farah, she doesn’t think, to be polite if she thinks Genevieve’s done a poor job of something. Farah is one of the sweetest people she’s ever met, but she’s also apt to tease even when something might be a sore spot.

A few more hours of careful felting closes all of the holes. It’s not flawless, of course, but she thinks it’s done well, all the same.

The lining, she opts to replace entirely. Silk is an absurd extravagance, but… even knowing Morgan’s sensitivity is more pronounced than that of most vampires, Genevieve still suspects that anything else would cause a constant low-grade irritation. 

Especially given Adam’s clear preference for t-shirts. She’s not complaining about that, but it means that much of the time there’ll be nothing between skin and lining, at least in the sleeves. So silk it will be.

That part takes a few nights. It’s been a long time since she did so much hand-sewing, but she doesn’t trust her machine with silk. She doesn’t entirely trust herself, either, but slow and steady is safer - and in any case, she has a seam ripper and a surfeit of determination to do this right.

\--

Adam is, naturally (supernaturally?), long-healed by the time she’s mostly finished with the lining; he was better in less than 48 hours, with no physical sign of how near he’d come to dying. She can’t decide if that’s a relief or not. She doesn’t wish him in pain. She’d never wish that. But it seems like there should be some reminder, something visible, to remind all of them how close they came to losing him.

Something to remind them that time is precious. That even for an immortal, it can be finite, cut short.

Then again, she doesn’t think she’ll forget. Doesn’t think she could.

At least it gives her something new to have nightmares about.

\--

The last thing she does is replace the buttons; one was missing, probably torn off in the fight, and she can’t find a good match. Better to replace the lot than have one missing, or loudly mismatched.

She keeps the old ones, though. Slips one into her pocket and enjoys the weight of the brass, keeping it close like a little talisman. Any time she’s fretting, she can reach in to touch it, this little physical reminder that he’s alive. Alive, and maybe--

No. No, she’s going to believe her own ears and the encouragement of a good friend who wants her to be happy. The question isn’t whether he returns her feelings, it’s whether he’ll let anything come of it.

But he feels something.

So she keeps the button, and brushes her fingers over it throughout the day, reminding herself that Adam is alive, and not indifferent to her after all.

\--

She bundles the coat into a tote bag and hopes none of them will comment; Nate, because he is a gentleman, obviously doesn’t pry, but Farah, who was slumped on one of the sofas in an operatic pose that clearly conveys that she has been _dying_ of boredom, springs to her feet with a broad grin as soon as Genevieve comes in. Genevieve answers her smile with one of her own and tilts her head towards the kitchenette. Farah follows, of course, without a shred of subtlety or stealth.

“Genevieve,” she whispers, delighted, “are you _plotting_ something?”

“What? No!” Is that a lie? It doesn’t feel like a lie, but… “Not exactly?”

Farah waves that off.

“You’re too nice to really prank anyone, obviously, but you’re trying to be sneaky!”

She looks so excited about it that Genevieve has to laugh - and Farah is right, anyway. Apparently her anxious awkwardness is coming through loud and clear.

Instead of answering, she pulls the coat out and spreads it on the countertop.

“I need you to tell me if it’s okay,” she says, suddenly scared to hear the answer. She did her best, but what if it’s awful?

Farah’s finger finds every single one of the mends, and her heart sinks. She steels herself for the answer and asks,

“Too obvious?”

“Nah,” Farah says, and sounds like she means it. “You can tell it’s been mended, but you did a good job. It’s got character, just like your apartment!” Her smile goes a little soft. “It’s nice when something is loved enough to be worth mending, right? It means you didn’t want a new one, you wanted the one you had, even if it’s not perfect.”

Genevieve considers the way Morgan had winced away from all the colors in her apartment, and Adam’s total indifference to the bright, cluttered coziness. Maybe he’d rather just buy a new coat.

“I’m not certain any of that will be in its favor,” she murmurs, but from the doorway, Nate says,

“It’s a sign you worked hard to do something nice for him, Genevieve. He’ll appreciate it.”

“He might not say so, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be true,” Farah agrees.

Genevieve looks down at the coat, and then up at them, and then at the clock. Adam is supposed to be on patrol for almost another hour, which is the only reason she was brave enough to bring the coat over today.

“Would you give it to him for me?”

“Genevieve--”

But she’s already eeling past Nate and out of the warehouse entirely, babbling, like it will cover up the way her heart is racing in terror at the thought they might try to make her stay and do it herself;

“Sorry, have to go, I have a… thing.”

\--

She does, in fact, have a thing; the thing in question is babysitting Verda’s girls while he and Eric go out for date night. She technically has an hour before she needs to be there, but they won’t object if she’s early, and she really needs to be somewhere other than the warehouse or her apartment, around people who aren’t going to look at her like she’s a helpless baby animal which has wandered out into traffic.

She’s aware, thank you; being in love with Adam is terrifying.

It probably says something about her as a person, she reflects, that she was too scared to give Adam a present in person. But given their history, she can’t even be cross with herself for it. She has words, now, to give her hope, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in the habit of brushing her off and pushing her away.

So yes; she is going to go hide and take comfort in the company of small children.

Genevieve puts her hair up in a scarf to avoid a repeat of the Great Matting Incident (Cara is not allowed to have a comb within two yards of Genevieve’s curls again until she’s fifteen, at least), then heads over. She can usually persuade the girls to agree on a movie while she gets dinner ready, and then they can do sing-alongs and microwave s’mores for desert, which should see them through to Lacey’s bedtime. Cara will join them for Lacey’s story and then insist on one of her own before she’ll go to bed, too, and then Genevieve just has to be quiet enough not to wake them, which in her experience means anything short of setting off firecrackers in the den while howling should be fine.

Verda and Eric come home a little after eleven to find her taking muffins out of the oven.

“Breakfast!” Eric exclaims, giving her a one-armed hug on his way past to look in on the girls. Verda stays in the kitchen giving her a look.

“Baked goods spontaneously manifest at the station when you’re worrying,” he murmurs. “Do I need to be concerned?”

“Everything’s fine,” she says, and then flushes a little. Everything. ‘Everything’ is a little better than fine, except that apparently she’s now going to go moon-eyed and ridiculous hearing perfectly normal words.

Verda’s eyebrows go up fractionally, but he - mercifully - chooses not to comment, possibly because he’s interrupted by a yawn.

\--

When her shift is over, she turns her face up into the last few rays of sunlight, sighing out all the stress and worry of the day and stretching her arms up. They’re all going to check out the re-opened carnival tonight, which at least means they’ll have a buffer if she’s gone and made things awkward. It’ll be fine. Farah will be there, too, so it'll probably even be fun.

Someone clears their throat, and she has her professional smile already in place when she looks over and--

Oh. Oh, he’s--

He’s wearing the coat.

She bites her lip to try to keep from smiling like an idiot and then realizes that her fluttering heartbeat has to be saying the same thing that her face wants to and there’s no point in hiding it. She lets the smile free. He accepted the gesture. She stuffs her hands into her cardigan’s pockets to keep from playing with her hair, and glances down.

“Hello, Adam.”

He looks…

She’s going to trust Farah. She’s going to trust herself. She meets his eyes.

He looks nervous, for half a heartbeat, before he crosses his arms and frowns, but where normally she’d read that as closed body language, as a preemptive rejection…

He’s not indifferent. He told her so. And he’s wearing the coat.

It’s not going to be a whirlwind, whatever it becomes, but she wouldn’t know what to do with that, anyway.

So she smiles at him. Because she’s watching for it, she sees the moment he wants to smile back. He doesn’t let himself, but that’s alright; he isn’t letting himself smile back today, and maybe he won’t tomorrow, or next week--

But someday, she’s pretty sure, he’s going to give her a true smile, and mean it. Someday, he’s going to say those words again. She just has to be patient, and keep listening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading!


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